When she had gone he turned back to me. “I like to rent to artists. We understand each other.” He tore her application in half. Then he giggled wildly. I joined him. I told him I would bring the check tomorrow. He suggested seven o’clock, and we shook on it.
Why hadn’t I said to Tony that I was a “good person”? Why had I settled on “obsessive about the rent”? For I thought of myself as a good person, a basically good person. I donated to charitable organizations, I recycled, I held the elevator. I was a good listener, I was relatively close to my parents, every so often I made people laugh. I didn’t lie. I hardly ever lied. But right in the middle of all this self-congratulation was a soft spot of rot.
Often I thought about what had happened at the pool. I knew I wasn’t to blame, and yet when I tugged at the car crash, trying to unravel its threads, I always ended up thinking about that day at the Swarthmore Swim Club: they were yoked together in my mind.
It had happened the year we were ten. By then, we were old enough to ride our bikes to the pool, to sign in without parents, to buy greasy dogs at the snack bar with bills damply mashed in our hands. That summer we spent nearly every day there; we came to know all the pool’s colors, its faded cornflower in the morning, the sparkling afternoon turquoise, its flickering white diamonds and the deepening sapphire of twilight.
I had passed the test for the deep end easily—I had done it the summer before, and the summer before that—but I stayed in the shallows with Lacie, who couldn’t swim, and who doggedly pretended she had no interest in the shimmering depths, where the blues were more layered, where the boys played.
If we could have gone beneath the red-and-white buoys, we would have played a few paces from the boys, pretending we were oblivious to their presence. Instead we had to pretend we were oblivious from the shallows, which was much less effective. For hours we held cannonball contests and underwater tea parties, and not even when Leo Kupersky yelled that we were totally gay did we look over. It would have been beneath our dignity.
After swimming we would lie on the side of the pool like two shivering seals, our arms tucked under our torsos, the gritty sidewalk abrading our skin, and it was nice, somehow, after the blue water’s give, to have tiny sharp rocks dig into our flesh. We rocked and baked in the heat. We soaked up all the sun stored in the pavement, and slowly the dark hairs on Lacie’s arm would soften, slowly her goosebumps would disappear. Watching her was like watching myself in the mirror; what I saw in her body was happening to mine. Yes, I thought. If the color this summer is blue, the sensation is heat.
I could lie in the sun forever, rays prickling and crinkling my skin, heedless of burns. I could even fall asleep like that, right on the pavement, with the shriek of the high divers in my ears, which must have been what happened that August afternoon, for I didn’t hear Leo come over, didn’t see his long brown foot nudge Lacie. Maybe distantly their voices braided through the gauze of my dream, but then I fell more deeply asleep. When I woke, I was alone.
The air at once felt colder, the sun dimmer. I scrambled upright. The skin of my thighs was mottled and red from loose stones.
They were playing by the deep-end’s edge, pushing and shoving, Leo grabbing Lacie and shaking her, her twisting free and raining slaps on his chest.
“Lacie can’t swim!” Leo yelled when I came over. “Everyone knows how to swim!” and he punched her on the shoulder. She was giggling, a high-pitched hysterical giggle I had never heard from her before.
“Yeah!” I yelled, seizing Lacie’s other shoulder. “Everyone knows how to swim!”
Lacie tried to wriggle free, but she was not very strong, and now there were two of us. She kept laughing, an exaggerated laugh that sounded like a sob, and screaming in a breathy voice, “Help! Help! They’ve got me!” while Leo and I chanted, “Everyone knows how to swim! Everyone knows how to swim!” shaking her, tugging her, as though she were our prisoner of war, and even now I can remember the feel of her sun-warmed skin beneath my palm, how I clutched it, how it felt good to grab and claw, to dig my nails in and screech near her ear, “Everyone! Everyone!” something mean and nasty in my hands, and while I was grabbing and shouting, Leo hooked his thigh around her leg and tipped her smoothly into the pool.
I don’t think we actually believed she couldn’t swim. When she dropped like a stone we were astonished. A moment later, she emerged, legs and arms flailing wildly in a spray of white surf. Then she disappeared again.
Neither of us moved. I almost thought she was pretending. It was like her weird laughter. Those fake screams.
Somewhere kids were shouting Marco! Polo! The diving boards creaked. There was a splash, and then the lifeguard’s whistle. I looked at Leo, his tiny delicate face, like a lemur, pursed in concentration. The two of us, together. The two of us with a problem to solve.
It must have been less than five seconds, those moments of hesitation, though in my mind they go on forever. They last and last. Lacie in the water, and me looking at him.
Then Leo took off yelling. He bolted to the lifeguard’s stand and grabbed the guard’s ankle. Shouted. Pointed.
Lacie bobbed up. Her dark eyes were alive with animal fear. I stretched out my hand, and she lunged, though the distance was impossible. Again she disappeared beneath the water.
When I looked up all eyes were on me. The pool had gone silent.
Then the lifeguard blew her whistle: eeeet! eeeet! She dove: fingers together, toes together. I looked again into the rippled turquoise swirl, the flash of pink flailing down there, and then the guard emerged, elbows hooked through Lacie’s scrawny arms.
* * *
—
I don’t dream of water often but when I do it haunts me. Subway tracks brimming with black liquid. Creek beds meandering silver and brown. Diving deep into a swimming pool—something cinematic about this one, slowed down and hushed, always girl bodies, white bubbles, blown out in a stream.
* * *
—
To all the questions of What were you thinking? Leo and I hung our heads. When the manager at the pool, a middle-aged woman pleasantly weathered by sun and cigarettes, exclaimed, “She could have drowned!” Lacie, wrapped in a towel, piped up, “But I didn’t. I’m fine,” and faced with such nonchalance, the manager had no choice but to let us go.
Leo spun off to find the other boys. In a careful silence Lacie and I walked to the picnic grove. I had three quarters in my hand; I was going to buy her whatever she wanted from the vending machine. I squeezed the coins so hard they became slick and warm.
“You were going to save me,” she said finally.
“I couldn’t reach.”
“You tried to save me,” Lacie said again, this time with more conviction. I was embarrassed for her; it had been awful to see her hopeless in the water, but she didn’t seem ashamed, or even that shaken up. “You’re a hero,” she added, and though she was kidding, she was also serious. I said nothing. The ridged edges of the quarters burred my finger pads.